We're pleased to announce the launch of a major new section of our website: Points of interest that you can click on to view and select for your journey.
We've integrated OpenStreetMap location data so that you can now click on points on the map. Just go to our journey planner tab and you can use the presets like bike shops, cafés, pubs, and many more.
(Mobile app developers: This data is also available through our API – see below.)
For instance, stations:
If you select a point, it is clickable. A Google Street View picture of the location will be shown, if it's a roadside location:
There's a link in the popup to the place's website if it has one.
There are lots of different POI types available:
You can browse locations anywhere the UK, for instance to find these independent bike shops in London:
Or perhaps no-one's added a location's website yet? Click on the 'add it' link in the popup shown above. Follow the link, click on the icon, click on 'Advanced' and then enter 'website' on the left and the URL on the right, and click Save. You'll need to create an OpenStreetMap account if you don't have one already.
You must not copy things from other people's maps, however – additions and edits must be based on your local knowledge of an area.
API
This data is now all available through our API so that it can be integrated into your cycle routing app.
We're aiming with CycleStreets to provide the highest possible quality cycle routing, to give people trust in routes they plan. We've heard from many users how our routing is helping them give the confidence to use a bike for their journeys, and from people who've discovered cut-throughs and safer, easier routes for their existing journeys.
Increasing the quality of the routes found by CycleStreets means using more sources of good quality data. For instance, a cycle lane can improve a planned cycle journey, but not if the cycle lane is too narrow. On the other hand if the cycle lane is wide and has a good surface, it can be better than a shorter route on a busier road.
The information that CycleStreets uses to base its route recommendations comes primarily from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project. Over time that data has become more detailed in both depth and breadth, and it continues to do so.
Over the last 18 months, the UK's Department for Transport (DfT) has undertaken a GPS-based survey of cycling infrastructure in towns and cities around England. This has been used for a related project, the Transport Direct multi-modal journey planner.
The DfT is keen to see this data used more widely and we've been talking to them about using it in our routing, by making it available as open data that could be merged into OpenStreetMap.
We're delighted now to announce that we're helping the DfT with its laudable objective to make this data more widely available. We’re working with its contractor, CycleCity Guides, who are well-known for producing a wide range of Local Authority cycle maps. The release of this data is one of a number of other datasets that the Cabinet Office has recently announced will be made available.
Rather than merely dump the data on data.gov.uk, the DfT is going a step further to help it be used, a development it should be highly commended for.
Respecting the way the way the OpenStreetMap community works, the DfT is planning to:
Make the data available in a fully OSM-compatible format, aligned to OSM geometry with converted attributes.
Simultaneously publish a dataset aligned to Ordnance Survey's (OS) Open data
Use a standard, OSM-compatible license (the Open Government License), with the data unencumbered by OS derivative data issues.
This data, which has mostly been collected by surveyors on bicycles, has the potential to significantly improve the quality of routing in some areas of England. We are well aware, however, that data collected by other agencies can undermine the work of OSM volunteers in the area if not handled sensitively, and so we've stressed that automated, bulk imports would not be accepted by the OSM community.
Instead, useful data needs two things if it is to be used in OSM. Number one is a way of inspecting and accepting/rejecting the data on a street-by-street basis via the simplest and quickest means possible. Secondly encouraging routing engines and renderers to use the data. Therefore:
Funding we've obtained will pay for a month or two of solid work on Potlatch 2, the default editor on the OSM website. We've engaged Andy Allan, one of Potlatch 2's core developers, for this. The funding will lead, amongst other improvements, to a generic tool to enable donated data to be merged in (or rejected), street-by-street via manual inspection and approval. A range of general usability improvements (such as those in the P2 buglist) will also be funded.
We'll be implementing support for many more advanced routing attributes, which Andy and hopefully other OSMers will be helping with. This will demonstrate the difference that really detailed data can make to the quality of cycle routes found by engines like CycleStreets when the community merges in (by inspection) this type of data.
A range of other improvements will also be made, for instance, changes to our feedback system so that errors in OpenStreetMap, found as a result of people using the routing, can be more easily discussed and fixed in OSM.
We hope the OSM community will react positively to these developments.
With community support, this data should help get lots more useful data into OSM and help it become a superbly detailed dataset ever more quickly.
We've been particularly impressed at the way that our contacts at the DfT have been open to learning about the way the OSM community works. We particularly hope that the success of this project will act as a demonstration and lead to more trailblazing open data initiatives where government learns from existing communities to 'do open data the right way'.
Last week we took part in the GeoVation Camp at the Ordnance Survey's splendid new HQ in Southampton. It was a fun, if exhausting, weekend.
The purpose of the weekend was for GeoVation to narrow down to a final shortlist the ideas that would go to the final.
Our proposal is called 'Helping Campaigners Campaign' (a more catchy title to be determined!), and is aimed at making the work of existing cycle campaign groups be as efficient and effective as possible.
Over the weekend, we, along with the other 20 groups through to this stage of the contest, developed their ideas and prepared a presentation to the judges as well as a 2-minute pecha kucha presentation.
We're pleased to say that we're into the final 10! We'll be attending the final pitching stage on May 4th, and are looking forward to it. If we are amongst the winning groups, this would result in funding of around £30,000 to implement the idea.
Several other proposals that we really liked, such as MySociety's FixMyTransport for mobile and a mobile multi-modal journey planner (which we hope would use our routing!) were also through to the final, which is great news.
Today is our second birthday – CycleStreets was launched on 20th March 2009.
The last year has seen a huge amount of development work, leading to new features, speed improvements, and more. However, the next six months will be even busier as the project really ramps up!
In the first year, CycleStreets planned 67,000 routes. In our second year, around 437,000 routes have been planned, and the rate of increase continues to climb. By November we had planned enough routes to cycle to the moon ten times, and in February, we reached the milestone of half a million journeys planned.
A major challenge we faced a year ago was the technical challenge of generating the routes fast enough.
A year ago, CycleStreets used a routing engine written in PHP (!) that we created for the Cambridge-only predecessor of CycleStreets – the Cambridge Cycling Campaign journey planner. It was slow, taking half a minute to plan a route across London, and taking up most of the system resources. Effectively, it was the wrong technology and didn't scale to UK-wide routing.
We held our first Developer Day, which lead to very productive discussions about the routing engine and how we could provide routes to users of the site faster. A friend of the project, George, wrote us a new engine (using Python) which lead to a massive speed-up. Then Robin, another volunteer, took the Python engine and created an even faster version in C++. This has been in place for most of the year and has quietly sat at the heart of the system, planning routes in a few GB of RAM while barely challenging the processor.
The work on the routing engine meant that we have been able continually to increase the maximum planning distance, which is now 200 miles (320km), which is well above a day's cycling! The development version of the system can even now do Dover to Cape Wrath!
Improving the routing speed was a key requirement for mobile apps, several of which signed up to use our routing through the year. These include the leading app for the London cycle hire scheme – London Cycle: Maps & Routes, plus two other excellent 'boris-bike' apps, the briliant and world-first 3D bike satnav app, Bike Hub, BikeRoute for Android and, of course, our own CycleStreets for iPhone app.
Our own iPhone app was made possible thanks to two grants we successfully applied for.
Our Android app is nearing completion, and like the iPhone app is being developed as an open source project. Thanks to our mobile developers for their brilliant work on these.
Through the year we have given various presentations and got involved with various social enterprise -related activities., such as WhereCamp EU, CamTechNet, Cambridge Geek Night and Net2Camb amongst others. These events lead to interesting discussions and also resulted in useful new contacts, such as people helping out with our mobile apps.
It was a particular plesure to give a presentation to Net2Camb as it gave us the opportunity to speak about the challenges faced by us as a not-for-profit social enterprise, rather than purely talking about technical challenges.
We have launched a funding drive for £130k to raise funds for two full-time developers. Such funds would enable the project to move forward much more quickly.
The DfT has this year been collecting cycling data which we are keen to see added to OpenStreetMap. We have since had informal discussions with Cycling England about use of the data, and how conversion of the data might be undertaken and at what cost. Discussions have been positive, and we feel this data would improve the quality of routes that we can deliver to users.
Over the year, more and more governmental bodies have been linking to us. For instance, in April, Cycling Scotland linked to us, and we are keen to work with them to help motivate people to improve OpenStreetMap data in Scotland. Others, including some of the Cycling Demonstration Towns like Chester and Lancaster now link to CycleStreets, and we have just sent a new brochure to councils around England.
Increasing the flexibility of the CycleStreets platform has been an ongoing priority.
The year has also seen a few developments on the Photomap. This is an area we would like to do much more on, as explained in our GeoVation bid for which we have now been shortlisted.
We created, under contract for Cambridgeshire County Council, a site called 'Cycling Sorted' to help manage the shortage of cycle parking in that area. We are keen to create similar sites for other Local Authorities. We have also created a similar system to support the great work of London Cycling Campaign.
OpenStreetMap is the backbone of our project, and we have been pleased to promote OSM and encourage more mapping for it. Over the summer we helped obtain a database of all the bike shops in the UK, for use in OSM, from the Association of Cycle Traders. Much of this has been merged into OSM, but more needs to be done to complete this crowd-sourcing exercise.
CycleStreets' use of open data saw it being featured on the front page of the government's new data website – data.gov.uk.
Routing quality work, however, remains our highest priority. Our aim is to provide the highest quality routing possible for cycling, using our knowledge as cyclists. Various improvements have been made recently, and we are currently working on new routing attributes and reducing the wigglyness of some routes, which is proving a difficult problem to solve with limited hardware resources.
Simon and Martin, lead developers, would like to thank a range of people who have helped out in various ways, such as Andy, Shaun and David from OpenStreetMap, George and Robin for work on the routing engine, huge support from Chris in Edinburgh, George from Camden, our mobile developers – Alan, Neil, Jez, Theodore, Christopher and Jonathan, advice and a free dev server from our brilliant web hosts Mythic Beasts, our designer Ayesha, Jeremy for occasional advice on business matters, support from key individuals at the CTC, LCC and Cycle Nation plus others in our stakeholder group, Carlton and Bike Hub, helpful ideas and data from cycle campaign groups around the UK, and of course the amazing community of OpenStreetMap contributors whose mapping makes everything possible.
Lastly, we would like to thank our users, whose cycling needs provide us with the inspiration to keep going, and who provide us with much feedback and many great ideas.
Cycling in the Netherlands happens because of bike-friendly culture and excellent infrastructure.
Let's face it – cycling conditions in the UK need to be improved massively. Cycle lanes that end unexpectedly, roads shared with lorries and traffic fumes, non-existent cycle parking. Any cyclist can give you a catalogue of problems that need tackling.
The end result is far fewer people cycling than there should be. Despite odd spots around the UK like Cambridge, Oxford, York which have a cycling culture, the outlook around the UK is not great.
Cycle campaign groups are key to changing this. These groups – large and small, national and local, are the people on the ground who work make cycling better. They're already enthused, so we need to give them as much support as possible.
How can cycle campaigners deal with the deluge of problems on our streets?
As well as our journey planner, CycleStreets includes a Photomap (with so far around 26,000 photos), designed to allow cycle campaigners (like us) and the public pinpoint problems they experience. In short, it's a campaigning tool aimed to help campaigners do their job. However, it could be made a lot more useful and user-friendly than it currently is.
We plan to help solve the problems that every campaign group around the UK continually faces.
We want to build on the existing Photomap to provide cycle campaigners with the best possible tools to make their job much easier.
Cyclists and the public need a better way to pinpoint problems like lack of cycle parking, desirable new cycle paths, better on-street conditions, etc.;
Campaigners need tools to prioritise problems in their area and group related problems together;
People need simpler means to collaborate by adding local knowledge and views about each problem;
Cycle campaign groups need better tools to make the scale of the problem clearer;
People who cycle through an area need to become aware of campaign work going on;
The profile of local cycle campaign groups needs to be much higher and they can be helped get more members;
Campaigners shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel but have access to great tools immediately;
Campaign groups need to help Local Authorities listen and take up the problems;
Local Authorities and funding bodies need a clearer idea of the scale of the problem so that money can be found;
Campaigners need more direct access to related information such as collision statistics, to avoid having to search for it.
… all in the most user-friendly way possible.
How would it work, in brief?
Cyclists would pinpoint problems (points/lines) on a map, e.g. lack of cycle parking, hostile roads, absence of needed route, poor quality cycling conditions, etc., with a photo if available
(Mobile apps can also post to the database using the existing infrastructure to enable this.)
Others can publicly comment on each submission and add local knowledge
A 'heat map' of problem areas would start to develop, together with per-point indications of status of a problem
Each location effectively becomes an entry in both the map and in a forum-style view
Campaign group members would log in to their group's area of the website, and would have drag-and-drop -style tools to prioritise and discuss the locations. Locations could also be grouped together, e.g. so that multiple issues arising from one development are treated most effectively.
Documents, e-mails and web references can be 'attached' to a particular issue so that all information relating to one issue is in one place.
Cyclists in each area would also be encouraged to register and to 'draw on the map' their typical journeys (helped by the CycleStreets journey planner), so that they can then be alerted to issues and campaigns along those routes
As an issue progresses in terms of external campaigning, it is updated and 'published' in various ways via the site
Prioritised lists can be 'pushed out' to Local Authority contacts, or they can be invited to join the conversation
When issues are finally resolved these would be marked as such, also publicising the work of the group concerned
Where routes in the CycleStreets journey planner are planned that pass through improved areas, the work of the group would be publicised!
The whole system would need to be extremely user-friendly, so that it gets the widest possible usage and actively engages people without technical skills.
Our proposal
We are proposing to submit a bid to the GeoVation Challenge, the Ordnance Survey initiative which is running a funding competition, "How can we improve transport in Britain?".
We plan to bid for one of the six pots of £30,000 available to create an extremely user-friendly set of tools that would be available free-of-charge to every campaign group in the country, branded in an area-specific way and embeddable within campaign group websites.
Put simply, we want campaigners to be able to carry out their work much more effectively, to reduce the effort required, all the way from identifying problems to seeing them fixed. As members of Cambridge Cycling Campaign, we have ourselves long-needed tools like this, and we want to create a facility which will be enthusiastically taken up around the country.
Thanks to the brilliant work of Andy Allan, Richard Fairhurst, Tom Hughes, Dave Stubbs, Matt Amos and others, who have worked on OpenStreetMap's new 'Potlatch 2' editor, we've now been able to add an integrated data editor to the CycleStreets site.
We'll be customising the installation and integrating it more with existing pages and tools within the CycleStreets website in coming weeks.
Changes you make to the data go into the OpenStreetMap database directly. We then import that data every week or so.
(In other words, changes you make via our editing page don't reflect the routing immediately, but take up to a week. We're working to reduce that down, ideally towards a daily import now that we have more powerful server hardware thanks to your donations and some grants!)
The work to integrate Potlatch 2 into the site was extremely easy – it's clear that Andy et al have worked very hard to make that as simple as possible. (In fact, it was refreshing to find that integrating an external piece of software was straightforward rather than the usual problematic task it can often be!)
We'd also like to thank Tom Chance, whose excellent introductoryguides we adapted, with his kind permission.
We really enjoyed the January Net2Camb Meetup event, where one of our lead developers, Martin, gave a talk 'Our Story'. Thanks to Claire for organising the event and everyone who came!
It was particularly enjoyable as it was a rare opportunity to talk about the business and competition aspects of CycleStreets, about the challenges we face, and the future opportunities for the project.
We were also pleased that a couple of people came forward as new volunteers!
We're speaking at the Net2Camb meetup event, on the subject of 'Building CycleStreets'. It should be a really enjoyable and social evening; do come along!
The talk will be suitable for both non-technical and technically-minded people alike.
CycleStreets is the UK-wide cycle journey planner, whose website has just seen its third-of-a-millionth route planned. Enabling people to plan cycle journeys from A-B anywhere in the UK, it has been created by two Cambridge-based people (plus help from others, not least OpenStreetMap mappers!) who have combined their interests in cycling and computing. It uses information from OpenStreetMap, the map equivalent of wikipedia.
Martin Lucas-Smith will explain the history of the site, what it can do, and the challenges that CycleStreets faces as a social enterprise with virtually no funding but masses of ideas and enthusiasm.
About the venue:
This event is at a new venue, a pub called The Emperor on Hills Road, convenient to the city centre and train station. The pub just opened, and the landlord is the same as the Empress, which won pub of the year 2010. The Emperor is located where The Globe used to be.
We're really thrilled by the response to our iPhone app and the other apps using our routing.
What is also just as pleasing is seeing people discovering OpenStreetMap as a result, and saying that they're interested in getting involved. OpenStreetMap is the brilliant open data map that provides the data that CycleStreets and other projects use.
For those not familiar with OpenStreetMap: It's basically like a 'Wikipedia of maps' – anyone can contribute to it, and each such contribution is a valuable addition that adds to the collective knowledge of what exists, where. CycleStreets (and others) regularly take this data and import it into a compressed format that we then use to route over. We apply subjective scoring over this objective data in order to route you from A-B. Mobile apps springing up basically work by sending details of the required journey (i.e. start/finish points and type of journey, e.g. quiestest/fastest) to our service, and our data endpoint (called an 'API') returns the route solution.
So how can people get involved?
Starting with the most easy thing, a good way to start is by adding Points Of Interest (POIs) to the map. For instance, if a bike shop or a spot for cycle parking isn't present, you can go to the map and add it.
We've written a guide on How to add a bike shop to OpenStreetMap. Once you're used to the (currently) slightly quirky interface, it's very easy and addictive. And our friends in OpenStreetMap are busy working on a new-generation editing system (called Potlatch 2) which will make things even easier.
Another way of editing information in OpenStreetMap is MapZen, which is also available on iPhone. It certainly makes it nice and easy to add information to the map, especially on the move.
If you have a GPS device you can also go out mapping! Basically this involves cycling/walking around and obtaining a GPS trace from where you go, and recording on your journey things like street names, points of interest, information about the street itself (which is very important for cycle routing!) and so on. When you get home, you can use a tool such as JOSM (the Java OpenStreetMap editor) to straighten out the GPS traces, to enter the metadata you've collected, and then finally upload it to OpenStreetMap itself.
The OpenStreetMap Wiki is the gold mine of information about OSM and how you can take part. Over 300,000 people around the world already are involved, and we hope you'll join them.
Be warned, though, mapping is addictive!
We also feed back problems in the data, highlighted in route feedback we get, back into OpenStreetMap. We always need volunteers for this, and we are working on a better system for making this route feedback more accessible to people (currently our backend is rather poor).
Got some existing data?
Local Authorities and others may have existing data that they'd like to see CycleStreets use. To do this, they need to get this data into OpenStreetMap, not CycleStreets itself, so that everybody benefits.
A key issue is confirmation that other parties such as the Ordnance Survey do not have rights in the data. Secondly, you need to agree to the OpenStreetMap license, which basically gives other people the right to use the data, to share it, and to modify it. Of course, you also have the right to do these things with the modified data too.
The second issue is preparing the data in a suitable format. OpenStreetMap is a community of volunteers, and are quite rightly is wary of mass imports of data, because they often duplicate existing data that people have painstakingly collected on the ground, and such datasets are not always as up-to-date as a real survey. However, such data can be extremely useful as a prompt for where physical attributes exist, so that people can then pull across data from your dataset into the live OpenStreetMap data after manual observation.
An example of this is the new Bike Shop Locator tool which OSMers Shaun and Andy have written. This contains a great dataset of the 2,500+ independent bike shops in the UK. The tool provides a way of merging in this data, and we encourage people to do so, so that OpenStreetMap is as full-featured as possible.
Only this week, CycleStreets has received two offers of datasets, which we will respond to positively and refer to our OSM contacts. We are also seeking funding to channel money into creation/maintenance of tools for OpenStreetMap that enable such observational merging to be done more effortlessly.
If you have cycling-related data that you'd like to see included in OpenStreetMap – and therefore be used by CycleStreets – please do contact us and we can put you in touch with suitable people to help make things happen.
CamTechNet have kindly featured us this week in their 'Voices in the crowd' series.
We discuss who we are, the history of CycleStreets, involvement of other people in our enterprise, the Startup community in Cambridge, and our hopes for the future.
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Points of interest
How can cycle campaigners deal with the deluge of problems on our streets?
Here is our full draft proposal.
